Day 13: driving in the south of Italy

Driving in Sicily is a sport. Most drivers don’t signal when changing lanes, drive over the dividing line, have no concept of speed limits and are perfectly comfortable following other cars closer than anyone should parallel park. You’ll be going along at 100km/h in an 80km/h zone (slower than that will get you run off the road), and still you’ll get passed by cars going 120km/h.

I’m surprised we haven’t seen a single accident while driving the more than 100km from Palermo to Trapani. Italians clearly learn the sport of racecar driving at a young age. No wonder Ferrari, the most valuable F1 team, comes from Italy. They only need to make the car; drivers can be picked up anywhere in the Sicilian streets.

We might not have seen accidents, but the number of cars on the side of the road changing a flat tire or that broke down is staggering. We’ve seen at least one every 20 minutes while we were on the road. Clearly, their driving style takes a big toll on their cars.

Now, if driving in Sicily is a sport, driving in Palermo is a blood sport. Like on the highway, drivers will stay on the dividing lane, drive faster than they should and keep their front bumper within an inch of your back bumper. However, that‘s not the only thing they do. First, the other lane they keep half of their car in is the oncoming traffic lane. They’ll only get grudgingly back in their own lane if they are 100% sure you’ll collide with them if they don’t. It’s a constant game of chicken. Still, it’s manageable; you learn to trust that they’ll move out of your lane at some point.

What adds a lot to the chaos are the motorcycles and scooters (but mostly scooters). They’ll move around cars as if they're on an obstacle course. If your vehicle has proximity warning (like ours), it’ll constantly engage, thinking you’re trying to park at 30km/h. This is, of course, due to scooters attempting to pass you on either side of your car within an inch of your door panel. If the street is wide enough for two cars side by side with their mirrors retracted, guess what, it’s now a two-car. Don’t worry, there’s no line in the middle, and there’s a sign saying no passing, that’s only a suggestion. Of course, while that is happening, you’ll get scooters passing you on either side and, in a feat of magic similar to how the night bus in Harry Potter can slim down to pass between two double-decker buses, you’ll find scooters passing between two cars where there can’t be enough space.

That the city of Palermo didn’t ban all cars from its streets still baffles me. But like millions of others, we survived the drive there and escaped without additional scratches on our rental car (it already had a couple of deep gouges on the driver’s side door after only 500km of service as a rental car).

On the plus side, Palermo drivers do respect red lights. Well, eventually they appreciate it. There’s the courtesy half-second once your light turns green to let other motorists through (as they figure they have half a second after their light turns red to pass through the intersection). Everyone seems to respect this, but no more. Indeed, you’ll start getting honked at if you haven’t departed within the first second of the light turning green, regardless of the risk that you will get t-boned by the oncoming traffic. That’s your problem, not a problem for the people behind you.

All that sporty driving got us to the salt museum near some beautiful salt ponds (that’s where they let seawater evaporate and collect the resulting salt). The museum came with a restaurant where we had a lovely fish couscous (a local specialty) on a terrace. The museum itself wasn’t much to look at, and they forgot to charge us the 3€ entry fee (we didn’t bother reminding them, as it was essentially a couple of maps and some wooden implements for collecting and transporting salt). The enjoyable part of the excursion was walking around the ponds at different stages of production (full, almost empty, and everything in between). In the area, the water takes on a pinkish hue as some evaporates, leaving more salt (and other minerals) behind.

Diner was a seafood affair (we’re on an Island in the middle of the Mediterranean, what did you expect their specialty to be). We had the chance to try the same seafood (shrimp, their version of lobster, octopus, swordfish, clams) raw, cooked in pasta and fried. I’ve mentioned this in previous trip logs, but not during this trip, the Italians have a pasta course between the starters and the main course. So we got antipasti (starters) with raw seafood, then primi (pasta course) with the same seafood, and finished with our secondi (main course) with the fried seafood. The experience was fun, but made us realize that seafood tastes pretty much the same, cooked or not, and it’s the seasoning that makes the difference.

Since we got to Sicily, getting limoncello as a digestive has gotten close to impossible. We’re told it’s finished. We’re guessing that limoncello is more of a seasonal liquor around here, but we don’t know what the season is.